judgment day

Stephen Hawking, probably the world’s leading living theoretical physicist, has recently received a significant hardware and software upgrade courtesy of Intel — and to celebrate, he has conducted a few interviews. Hawking, is never one to shy away from the contentious or mildly crazy — but this time, we have a couple of humdingers. First, Hawking says he would love to be the big baddie in a James Bond film. Second, he believes that artificial intelligence ‘could spell the end of the human race.’

Microsoft has become one of the first companies to deploy autonomous robot security guards. Dubbed the K5, this roughly human-sized 300-pound (136 kg) robot is equipped with enough cameras, sensors, and alarms that it can replace most human security patrols — but fortunately, despite looking like a Dalek from the Doctor Who universe, it is not equipped with a ray gun or any other method for harming or detaining humans.

When the eventual robot overlords of Earth write their history books, many chapters will be dedicated to the arrogance and folly of humankind teaching robots the best ways to take over the planet. One chapter will most assuredly be dedicated to IHMC’s Atlas, and the humans that taught it karate.

Zoltan Istvan, founder of the Transhumanist Party, has announced that he will be a contender in the 2016 presidential race. Having set forth many bold ideas in his recent prolific writings, he now embarks on a new mission to bring transhumanist philosophy to politics. We interview him to find out about his views on religion, politics, society, and more.

According to a new report that looks at how continuing improvements to artificial intelligence and robotics will impact society, ‘robotic sex partners will become commonplace’ by 2025. A large portion of the report also focuses on how AI and robotics will impact both blue- and white-collar workers, with about 50% of the polled experts stating that robots will displace more human jobs than they create by 2025.

Harvard and MIT engineers, showing reckless disregard for the robocalypse, have created origami robots that can self-assemble themselves — from a flat piece of paper and polystyrene — and walk away in just four minutes. “Getting a robot to assemble itself autonomously and actually perform a function has been a milestone we’ve been chasing for many years,” says Harvard’s Robert Wood, barely stifling a maniacal cackle.

Elon Musk, the mastermind behind SpaceX and Tesla, believes that artificial intelligence is “potentially more dangerous than nukes,” imploring all of humankind “to be super careful with AI,” unless we want the ultimate fate of humanity to closely resemble Judgment Day from Terminator. Personally I think Musk is being a little hyperbolic — after all, we’ve survived more than 60 years of the threat of thermonuclear mutually assured destruction — but still, it’s worth considering Musk’s words in greater detail.

Some foolhardy roboticists in France, who clearly haven’t read enough sci-fi books, have created a robot that can recover from a broken leg. More accurately, if the robot is immobilized by a broken leg, it only takes a few seconds for it to learn how to walk again, using a new gait that minimizes the impact of the broken leg. If robots are to become truly useful, they’ll have to be able to autonomously recover from damaged circuits and broken limbs.

Microsoft has unveiled Project Adam, its new artificial intelligence that it claims is 50 times faster than comparable state-of-the-art systems deployed by the likes of Google. Adam can look at an image of almost anything and tell you exactly what it is; it can even differentiate between a Pembroke and Cardigan corgi. Notably, while similar AIs are moving to massively parallel GPU computing, Adam uses plain old CPUs in Microsoft’s Azure cloud — an impressive feat that is only possible thanks to Microsoft’s use of lock-free Hogwild! computing.

64 years after the father of computer science, Alan Turing, proposed a method of testing whether a machine has obtained human-level intelligence, a 13-year-old AI boy called Eugene Goostman has finally become the first artificial intelligence to pass the Turing Test. Don’t worry, though, sentient computers aren’t about to take over the world: The Turing Test is actually rather flawed, and doesn’t really measure an AI’s capability for intelligent thought.

Google has acquired the British artificial intelligence company DeepMind for $500 million. There is no doubt that this acquisition is linked to Google’s hiring of futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil, and the string of eight robotics acquisitions that ended last year with the purchase of Boston Dynamics, one of the world’s biggest names in robotics. All the pieces are now in place for a Google-created Skynet and the robotic Judgment Day apocalypse that would surely follow.

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

ExtremeTech Newsletter

Subscribe Today to get the latest ExtremeTech news delivered right to your inbox.

Email

This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our
Terms of Use and
Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletter at any time.